With [Safe], Todd Haynes questions the bases of the American society of the 1980s as he focuses on his heroine’s mysterious debilitating condition. The director castigates both the unchartered urbanization of an affluent society and a radically different way of life, apparently closer to nature, which echoes some of the main concepts of the New Age ideology. The irreversible deterioration of the heroine’s health creates some dark and eerie atmosphere which may then instill in the audience’s minds some ontological questioning radically tinged with pessimism.